03 September 2018 1:01 PM

Here are some further thoughts on our ridiculous cultural cringes over foreign names, largely stimulated by a contribution from Geoffrey Warner.

Geoffrey writes :

‘There are problems in transcribing a foreign language into English, especially if the foreign language has no alphabet and is tonal. This is the case with Chinese. Unlike Mr Hitchens, I don't see the use of the Pinyin system of transcription instead of the Wade-Giles as demeaning in any way. It is simply better. I recommend an article on the web entitled "How Wade and Giles did a disservice to the English speaking world" which explains the matter in more detail. If the two systems were similar, it might not matter, but confusion can arise. Thus, a student of mine inadvertently created two separate Chinese warlords in an essay simply because the name of the single warlord in question was transcribed differently in the books she read!’

I reply: I don’t in principle disagree with this, though I personally find Pinyin ridiculous, because of the way it expects the reader to know that letters such as ‘Q’ and ‘X’ are pronounced in a way quite unknown to any culture which uses the Roman alphabet. The man who was for years named in British newspapers as Liu Shao Chi, is now Liu Shaoqi. How is that a better guide to how his name is actually pronounced? And it does daft things, like substituting the hissing, unpronounceable ‘Xinjiang’ for the easily pronounceable ‘Sinkiang’, friendly to an English tongue and eye. Why bother?

I’d also point out that the Chinese language does not really exist in the way that the English language does.

An example from real life: I travelled some years ago deep into the Canton countryside (which Pinyin would insist I called the ‘Guanghzhou’ countryside), to interview a woman who had had her house demolished by the Chinese Communist Party , for daring to refuse an abortion and instead have a second child. This story itself may explain my hostility to any attempts to pander to the Chinese state.

She spoke a Cantonese dialect. The Mayor of the village translated this into standard Cantonese. The driver of our taxi, hired in the city of Canton, then translated this into Mandarin for the benefit of my own translator, who put it into English for me. And of course, the other way round. The interview, as you can imagine, took some time.

So attempts by any English person to attempt an authentic ‘Chinese’ pronunciation are pretty much absurd anyway. And the wide differences in the language spoken in different parts of Planet China are one of the reasons why our names for Chinese cities are often so far from the pronunciations of them in modern ‘official’ post-Mao Mandarin. And this, I suspect, is itself a very different language from pre-revolutionary Mandarin. In the same way, post-Soviet Russian is different (even the alphabet was changed) from pre-1917 Russian, and Estuary English is different in shape, grammar, vocabulary and intonation from the ‘Oxford’ English still unselfconsciously used by the upper crust in my childhood and early teens.

But back to the main subject. There simply is no consistency in the great fashion for using ‘authentic’ names for various countries and cities. The only thing these affectations have in common is a desire for self-abasement.

For a start, they very seldom apply to the *countries* involved as well as the cities. Why not? How many people who pretentiously call Bombay ‘Mumbai’(more on this later) or Calcutta ‘Kolkata’ call India ‘Bharat’? But that is in fact its name, if you believe that we should call foreign places what their inhabitants call them. Likewise, how many of those who insist on calling Peking ‘Beijing’ , and Nanking ‘Nanjing’, refer to China by its actual name of ‘Zhongguo’? In my experience, none of them even know that this is what this country calls itself. My favourite is of course ‘Baile Atha Ciath’, the ‘official’ name for Dublin, which appears on the numberplates of cars registered there. No British person uses it, and quite a lot of Irish people don’t either.I am sure London liberals would use this name if they could only work out how to pronounce it, but it hasn't happened yet. They compensate by calling Londonderry 'Derry'.

Nearer to home, we simply don’t do this at all. Nobody calls Paris ‘Paree’, and seventy years ago English people familiar with France would have called Marseille ‘Marseilles’ in writing and pronounced it ‘Marsails’. I am fairly sure that ‘Lyon’ would also have been known as ‘Lyons’ and pronounced ‘Lions’. In the 19th century, English people simply did not bother to use French pronunciations for internationally famous French names. In his ‘History of England’, Thomas Macaulay refers to Louis XIV as ‘Lewis’. This is not because he was ignorant, but because it was normal to Anglicise French names at that time.

So it still is when most other countries are concerned. I know of nobody in Britain who speaks or writes of ‘Sevilla’, ‘Wien’, ‘Roma’ , ‘Den Haag’, ‘Kobenhaven’ , or come to that ‘Sverige’ or ‘Suomi’, let alone ‘Hrvatska’ , ‘Polska’ , ‘Magyargorszag’ or ‘Ellas’. Though there is a small society of pretentious persons who insist on calling Barcelona 'Baaathelona' , like the BBC experts who call Afghanistan 'Afxhanistan' and the Taleban the 'Tarlybarn'.

I used to get anguished queries from sub-editors about the ‘right’ way to transcribe Russian words into English. There isn’t one. The Cyrillic alphabet, currently with 32 letters, simply doesn’t do a direct transliteration. Gorbachev or Gorbachov? Who cares? Yury, Yuriy or Yury? What does it matter? The same is even more true of Arabic and Farsi. ‘Asad’ or ‘Assad’? ‘Osama’ or ‘Usama’? Tehran or Teheran? Frankly, who needs to know? The chances are that a non-Arabic speaker or non-Farsi speaker wouldn’t even spot these familiar names in a sentence when they were pronounced by a fluent Arabic or Farsi speaker.

Russians don’t say ‘Saint Petersburg’. They say (roughly) ‘Zankt Pitterburg’. When it was called ‘Leningrad’, my Russian teacher, who came from there, despaired of teaching me how to pronounce the ‘Lenin’ part as a Russian would speak it.

Half-educated people think that Moscow is known in Russian as ‘Moskva’. But it isn’t. It is pronounced to sound much more like ‘MaskVA’ with the emphasis heavily on the ‘VA’.

On and on the examples go. A little learning is a dangerous thing. Do they think foreigners call England ‘England’ or London ‘London’? Not often. They have their own names for our country and its famous cities, and this is a compliment to our country and those cities, for being important enough to deserve a Russian or French or Italian renaming. I might ad that thr last time I checked, major French, Germand and Italian newspapers referred to the capital of Zhongguo as ‘Pekin’, not as ‘Beijing’ .Perhaps, not having had to kowtow to China over Hongkong, they just don’t take part in our cultural cringe. .

And so back we come to Bombay. A good friend of mine who comes from there is livid at the way people in the West, thinking they are being enlightened, call it ‘Mumbai’. He associates this name with a rather nasty local demagogue, a Hindu nationalist who insisted on the name change, and he (along with many of his friends and family from Bombay) flatly refuses to use it whether he is there or here. In his view, every time a Westerner uses ‘Mumbai’, that westerner helps strengthen a nasty political tendency, of the kind he would almost certainly disapprove of, if it operated in Britain.

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25 January 2012 3:55 PM

The mention of the word ‘child’ or ‘children’ in any political speech is often – though not always - a warning of humbug to come. The old Soviet Union used to assert that ‘children are our only privileged class’ a pretty bold claim from a state that had within living memory forced children to spy on their parents through the foul cult of Pavlik Morozov, and ripped infants from their parents’ arms (as the parents were despatched to the Gulag) and flung them, their names stolen, deprived of any love, to suffer and often die in cruel and hideous orphanages. But there. It is still impossible for most Western people (who often still make excuses for the USSR) to understand just how revolting Communism was.

I tend to think that the few legitimate occasions for referring to children in political debate are in discussions of abortion (legalised child massacre), the campaign to force women into the workplace and out of their homes (organised mass child neglect for profit), comprehensive and ‘progressive’ education (egalitarian experiments on innocent boys and girls), and of course divorce ( legally putting the interests of adults before the interests of children), where the interests of the children are directly and demonstrably involved.

Now here we have an attempt to claim that the government’s rather modest and uninteresting welfare reforms, which deliberately avoid all the real most pressing problems, will create ‘child poverty’.

I think this is just emotionalism. As I so often say, there is no real, absolute material poverty in this country. Look at the living conditions portrayed in the TV series ‘Call the Midwife’, or those described in Somerset Maugham’s novel ‘Liza of Lambeth’ – or indeed the factual reports of poverty in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, and you will see what the word really means – unavoidable squalor caused by the simple lack of plumbing and sanitation, desperate overcrowding, real, gut-grinding hunger, untreated disease. You can find such things, as well, right now, in modern Bombay (those who wish to call it ‘Mumbai’ might like to check the Index item on this stupid, mistaken renaming by people who think they are being ‘progressive’), in Burma and in many African countries. I have seen it there. One of the striking things about it is that those who endure it are often even so unbroken, but dignified, self-disciplined, hard-working, house-proud, and send their children, in crisp uniforms, shining with cleanliness, off to school each morning. It is very moving.

It is also quite unlike the world of the British dependent population, who have all the material basics, but live amidst terrible state-encouraged moral squalor. In many cases, people resist this, and their struggles to maintain respectability and order in their lives area is as moving as anything in Africa. But in many cases they are corrupted by it, and the results are tragic and appalling.

What these people need is an organised and systematic moral rescue which, alas, Iain Duncan Smith is not ready to attempt. Even so, it is surely too much to ask struggling families who earn their bread and pay their debts, to subsidise others who don’t, at the sort of levels now seen.

Much of this problem arises from the mistaken sale of council houses, a measure universally praised by Tories, but which seems to me to have been one of the worst things done in the Thatcher era. This broke up settled communities, pumped billions of pounds into the housing market, so pushing up house prices and rents to absurd levels. And it led to the grotesque growth of Housing Benefit, which I think now costs more than the Army and the RAF put together, and which must be the most wasteful method of public housing subsidy ever devised.

Something plainly has to be done to put it right. I doubt whether Iain Duncan Smith has the key. But I will say this. The idea that his measures will cause ‘child poverty’ is just propaganda. And the idea that because a benefit is called ‘Child Benefit’ it will be spent entirely on children is so absurd that I don’t know where to look when anyone says it (and surely this is the implication of the dogmatic insistence that Child Benefit should be exempt from Mr Smith’s £26,000 benefit ceiling). And the idea that the children of Britain’s welfare-dependent households will have their problems solved by money is just thought-free.

What these children need is fathers, stable married families in which to grow and learn the rules of life, by example above all. If they had those precious possessions, they could, like their grandparents before them, be happy, healthy and good on surprisingly little money. As it is …